Iceman (21 page)

Eichord hung up the phone. Later he'd run the whole list of suspects by all the bank people. He started in on his OTHER list.

Eichord had stared at the list until it had begun to lose all meaning and then he began to doodle on it. The list of names read:

Gloria

Darleen

Ann

Elnora

May and out to the side: 39.6 followed by

Tina

June

Heather and out to the side of that: Diane? and the word “sperm,” but when he looked down, he noticed he had written spermwhale and then he caught the drift of the conversation around him and shook his head as he blacked it out.

“—see him in his goddamn trunks."

“Yeah.” Another voice, laughing. “I'll never forget the time we got invited over there and I told him I didn't think the ole lady would wanna go, ya know, on her period an’ that. I says. She's got a friend in town right now. And Dana goes. Oh, that's okay. Bring her along too."

Jack smiled. Laughing on the outside. Weirded out on the inside. He reached for the nasty plastic thing and dialed.

“Hello, beautiful,” he said when Donna answered. “Know who this is?"

“Sam, is this you?” she said urgently. “My husband's not here so you can say anything you like. Wanna talk dirty?"

“You're taking the words right out of my mouth."

“Oh, nifty! We can discuss what I'm not wearing. Would you like that?"

“Uh huh."

“Okay. What I'm not wearing is my clothes, Sam. How soon can you be here? I mean, I was going to take a little quickie shower. But if you can get here before What's-his-name gets home, we can take a little quickie instead. Sound good, Sam?"

“Unbearably good."

“And another thing. I thought we were going to talk dirty. I haven't heard a salacious remark out of your sexy mouth, mister."

“There's five guys sitting next to me who would love it, but let's wait till later. Speaking of later, it's going to be later than that. Which is to say about eight or nine.” He heard an audible groan. “I'm sorry. Duty calls. But never fear. Old hubby'll drag in the door in a few hours for his leftovers."

“Hubby? Hubby who-hubby. I thought this was my BOYFRIEND.” They agreed Donna would heat up something for Jack when he came in. And maybe save him some dinner, too. And they hung up.

Eichord left the squad room and went upstairs. He asked the girl on the board to call Schumway's, and she did so, finding out they closed at five. He got in his unmarked car and headed for North Buckhead.

Alan Schumway lived in a home that reflected the oddness of the man himself. Set back on an acre of expensive, well-tended lawn, a strange, two-story oddity sat like a stucco monument to an architectural experiment gone awry. Eichord sat a half-block down the street, trying to figure out what the house was saying. He decided it was saying, “I'd rather be at sea,” and surely the home did in fact resemble the prow of an ocean liner with its steeply jutting, angled front and the windows that almost suggested portholes. Eichord had been there for an hour and ten minutes when Alan Schumway pulled up. A new Buick with handicapped plates instead of the expected dealer tags.

“Mr. Schumway,” Eichord said as the man swung his chair out and began locking it into place beside him, “can I give you a hand?"

“No, Tracy, but you can give me a leg or two if you have some to spare. Hands I got. What the hell are you doing out here at this time of night? Did you lose Junior again?"

“Not this time,” Eichord said as he watched the man's powerful upper body wrestle with the chair. Schumway got into the device and slammed the door. “Well, come on, Double-oh-seven, let's go catch a buzz.” And he went off rolling toward the ramp to his front door. “Come along now. Just shuffle along. Try to keep up."

The house was very cool. Almost cold. Beautifully decorated in a chilly, sparse way, as if nobody lived there.

“Let's go upstairs,” he said after checking his mail.

“I won't take up much of your time,” Jack told him as they entered a large service elevator.

“Like what the hell do you WANT, copper?” he snarled in an old-movie gangster voice Eichord knew but couldn't place.

Jack laughed and did his tap dance about Norway. He'd lost the spelling of the fjord. This and that. Schumway didn't seem at all perturbed at the second intrusion, though he was overtly more curious than the first time. Eichord could sense animosity, but that in itself was nothing. Lots of people didn't like police much.

Eichord declined a drink with thanks, and while Schumway poured, he looked around.

“How much do you know about deco?"

“Mm.” Eichord shrugged. “I like it."

“You don't know art, in other words, but you know what you like."

“Right.” No hint of a pun in the man's tone. Could he be that calculating?

“Deco is mid-twenties. Parisian. The ladies’ compacts and the mirrors and the fringed Mondrianesque handbags and the pottery and the architectural moldings and the bronzes and the jewelry and the lighting fixtures.” The man's face glowed with enthusiasm and adoration. “The deco look. The look of the Paris Expo. Lalique and Mallet-Stevens and Desny and Bonet and all those dudes. This is a Desny right here,” he said lovingly, showing Eichord a piece of silver. “Ain't it a gas?"

“Yeah."

“You feel the power of it?” The mocking tone momentarily gone from the man's voice.

“Like a little Chrysler Building or Radio City Music Hall."

“Precisely so."

“Great."

“It all came out of cubism, see. Out of those marvelous Braque things, and the old man, of course, Pablo's seminal goodies. The cubists were the fathers of it, but then it got all hard and cold, streamlined. The prismatic geometric look. All suggestion. All line and sweep and rectilinear exaggeration and classical form and super-stylized angles and planes. Lightning bolts, ovals, repetition of rectangles and octagons, pyramids, silver and bright color and sun splash. The cubist prism, the Aztec temple look, the Egyptian pyramid, the mystic Secret Scarab, the mythical sunburst shapes of the Sun Gods.” He turned to a lit glass showcase. “My babies,” he whispered.

“Wow.” Eichord whispered back, caught up in it now. “Beautiful."

“My Roseville Futura.” He said it the way you point at a beautiful woman out by the pool or the tennis court as you tell your new business acquaintance, “That's my wife."

“Huh?"

“Futura.” His voice was barely audible. Reverence. “Roseville Pottery. The Smith'd fucking KILL to get one of these. These are the top three vases. The black is believed to be one of a kind. The most phallic fucking piece of Futura ever made."

“Yeah."

“I traded a priceless collection of Mayan and Peruvian terra-cotta phallics for that one piece. I would have given anything for it."

“What's that?” Eichord said, looking over at a table.

“Hmm?” The man in the chair had to look away from his precious showcase and glanced in the direction Jack was looking. “Oh, that goddamn thing. It's junk. I gave one of those assholes on Melrose out in L.A. a grand for it—just as a hoot."

“Is it a metal sculpture piece?"

“No.” The man laughed. He wheeled over to the round chrome object and did something to it and music squawked out of it. “It's a RADIO!” He laughed again.

“Wild."

“It's fucking outrageous. Art dreck-o. I love it all."

Eichord was hammered by the man's intensity and the feel of implicit latent power. The thought that kept nagging was, Could Alan Schumway get up from that wheelchair and walk? Do I yell fire? Or do I back off and stir the ashes a little and hope that when I move in to get him he hasn't packed up his wheelchair in his old kit bag and run away to Norway.

“Listen, one more thing, if I may. Somebody mentioned you have a, uh, personal secretary?” He looked down, not wanting to watch Schumway raise his eyebrows and do shtick while he tried to embarrass Eichord. “Does she live in? I was wondering if I might ask her a couple of brief questions while I'm here."

“Does she LIVE IN,” Schumway mocked. “Holy JEEZUS, Feste, you silver-tongued bastard.” Eichord smiled pleasantly while Schumway roared with laughter, then screamed at the top of his lungs, “NICKI!” And saying to Jack as he turned away, “I don't think she's here."

“Does she live here?"

“We hang out,” Schumway said. “Anything else you need right now?” Schumway stared into the glossy depths of the black deco vase.

Eichord doodled with the surface of his mind and had to fight from asking big Al from Norway, “Hey, Alan—is there a fjord in your Futura?"

I
n the living room, Daddy was drunk and disorderly, and very much on. He was unpredictable when he drank too much. Sometimes he would get horny and want her, and the sex might be rough or it might be sweet and tender and remarkably gentle. Or he would fall asleep and snore like a dockhand and he would not want her. Or he would become jolly and gregarious and want to take her out and show her off. Drink with the guys. Party. He could be very funny. Or he might become brooding. Moody. Mean. He could turn ice-cold and very dangerous.

She was nude and stood looking at herself, shoeless and wet, toweling off after a delightful bubble bath. She loved her body. She was a very beautiful woman, even now. One of the uniquely lucky ones. She had the small bones that had made her so womanly. The Beverly Hills were perfect, neither too large nor too small, her ass high and firm. Very female in every sense. The hormones, both the IVs and the regimen of oral drugs, had helped her voice, which was already a sexy huskiness, and her skin, which was her worst feature.

Nicki wasn't perfect. Her hair was too coarse, but she could afford the best wigs money could buy. Her jawline was a bit wider than she liked, but Daddy said it made her more interesting-looking and he looked at her with a critical eye. He loved the look of her long, slim legs in high heels. She had starved herself for so long—through her teens, in fact—that she no longer thought of food as she once had. She would subsist on bits of fruit, vitamins, the bare minimum. She went up on her toes and posed, then stood hipshot, but she could catch a glimpse of those ugly things a mocking God had placed between her legs, and she quickly changed position. She would tuck tonight, tuck them back out of sight.

Nicki Dodd, nee Nicholas Dodstardt, was a freak. She was neither female impersonator, nor transvestite, nor transsexual, nor any of the other categories that run the gamut from cross-dressing straights to drag-queen homosexuals. She was a woman with a penis and testicles. Not a play woman. Not a make-believe, Halloween, limp-wristed, flaming, swishing, lisping, pretend-time closet-faggot woman, but a REAL woman, through and through. Biologically, psychologically, every other way a woman. Just not physiologically. She was a beautiful, soft, slim, sexy, dynamite show-stopper of a freak of nature. A woman with a dick.

It still bothered her. She wondered how enraged her daddy would have become if he'd heard the conversation she'd had a few weeks ago. He thought she was totally comfortable with her plumbing. Depressed after one of his rough numbers, paranoid from his growing carelessness, and maddened by the frustrations of his goddamned fucking therapy, she had called Baltimore. Just for information. Nothing more. Dialing a toll-free hotline so it wouldn't show up on their bill.

“Nurse Recruitment?” a pleasant voice said into her ear.

“Hi. I'm calling long-distance to inquire about your program. What are the prerequisites for working in the—I'm not sure what you call it—your gender surgery clinic?"

“The general surgery clinic? Just a second please.” No, you idiot, she said as the woman clicked off to take another call. An eternity later the woman returned. “I just have the regular university number. I don't have anything called General Surgery Clinic."

“GENDER surgery."

“Oh. Gender surgery.” A long pause. “Is that like, you know, sexual?"

“Yes.” Another long pause.

“I'm trying to figure out how to look that up."

The line made noises while the woman did things to a computer far away in Maryland. The obtuse woman came back. Made her wait again because someone had just come into view whom she thought might know these answers. Her voice was rather patronizing, or so Nicki imagined, when she returned to say, “The university no longer does them.” THEM. She couldn't bring herself to enunciate such a word. “So that's why I couldn't find it under Gender or Sex, you know, in the listings."

“Do you know why they no longer ... Oh, never mind.” She hung up. So Johns Hopkins was no longer part of the scene. It took her another half-hour on the phone to learn that Barnes in St. Louis did them. Two other hospitals. Just making random calls to whatever toll-free numbers she could think of to try. She wondered if there had been malpractice suits. If the surgery had proven unsafe. Or was it public relations—that kind of thing? Probably none of the above.

Would getting her outside plumbing whacked off make her feel more womanly? Would trading a cock and balls for a vagina—complete with ersatz clit, no doubt—make her able to satisfy her man better. Hell, no. It would be an unnecessary and stupid risk. Just something she toyed with—her little ace in the hole, so to speak. An option. She was still in love with him. He was everything. Her life. Without his desire she would be dead. He wanted her this way.

“From-a Lick Pier, Sanna Monnica Bitch Californium, Itsa Larry Welg anna Champagna Muzik Makers,” she could hear him screaming over some taped dance band. “An now hereza Norma-um Enema to singa an play the accordiona-enema, Lady of Spain-enema!” Crazy fool, she smiled.

She would keep him with her hot mouth and kinky mind and beautiful eyes and long legs and great ass and Beverly Hills and cosmetic trickery. He liked it when she'd savaged the one with the low-cut blouses, Princess Di with her smug-ass mouth, telling her, “I'll do it,” when Nicki started packing her things. Saying to her later, “No, I need all of these,” when they packed her cosmetics. “I have to keep my peaches-and-cream complexion, you know.” Yeah. Nicki knew. She had sliced off the bitch's fat tits the moment Daddy had finished with her. The knife blade was sharp and she felt surprisingly good about it, not squeamish in the least, and Daddy really got off watching her work out. She could remember how he laughed like a little kid when Nicki had sliced the toes off, “This little piggie went to market,” slicing her fucking toes off like little white stubs. Blood all over everything. Daddy turning on and them playing in the blood.